To tip or not to tip? | Hacker News Reader

To tip or not to tip?

aeon.co

42 pointssergeant354 comments

"Tipping looks like an anachronistic hangover from a time when restaurant staff were the lowest of the low"

This is unfortunately still the case in America. I can't believe the author writes a long, elaborate article mentioning tipping in America without mentioning the minimum wage for food service in the US. Federally, it's currently $2.13/hr though employers are required to compensate employees so they make at least minimum wage ($7.25/hr currently). Waiting jobs are not minimum wage jobs, however. They require a ton of difficult work and I would venture to guess that if waiters/waitresses were only paid the typical minimum federal wage, we'd quickly see a shortage followed by a rise in wages (the current average wage in the US is $11.82) (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_Stat...).

At least in the US, this is not up for debate until we change the law. Until the 'to tip' is the only answer anyone who wants otherwise, no matter how good their intentions, is just greedy. The discussion, at least in the US, should be framed in terms of legal issues, not customary or other issues.

I think we would do best to change our stupid laws, pay waiters and waitresses a lot more, and be done with tipping. It really is un-American. But then again, sadly, so is paying someone a decent wage.

The author of the article certainly left that out.

However, you yourself left out the fact that in a few states, including California, this is not true: employers are required to pay at least minimum wage, upfront, to all employees, including waiters/waitresses -- they cannot pay the lower rate and then only bump it up to minimum wage if tips don't get you there (which is what happens in most states).

Just thought I'd point that out for the sake of completeness.

One of the hidden complexities of food service is that tipping often serves as a tax dodge. Servers often wind up taking home a fair amount of cash but reporting poverty-grade incomes.

I knew one lady who got a Section 8 voucher this way. She definitely did not qualify on what she regularly took home.

I've known bartenders who had issues related to this. Not from the IRS. They rarely seem to bother with service employees who report a "reasonable" percentage of their sales as tips.

The issues were with lenders, when the bartenders wanted to buy houses. They had enough income to easily afford the mortgage, but no records that indicated that. In the end, they dealt with a local lender that understood the situation, but it was definitely a hassle.

> "Tipping looks like an anachronistic hangover from a time when restaurant staff were the lowest of the low" > This is unfortunately still the case in America.

Which is enabled by tipping.

I argued on another HN article about tipping that it's better to change the law to protect lower-income employees first, and then change the custom, as opposed to trying to fight the custom by screwing over your server and hoping the law will eventually change. Fairly sure diners and businesses would change their tipping behavior pretty quickly to accommodate any change in the law.

I'm from Australia (no tipping) and have been living in North America for 9 years (always tipping) so this issue is close to my heart.

I've come to see tipping as a form of slavery, the only twist being it's paid - albeit very lowly.

It's a way for people with money to say "Hey peasant: If you do what I want, and if I'm happy about it, and if I feel like it, I might give you a little of my money. Or not".

Sort of like a work contract where the employer has ultimate power and absolutely no rules to govern if they even have to pay their employees at all. Of course, there are labor laws against that sort of thing in developed countries, so tipping is just a way to circumvent those labor laws.

It would be much better if those people were simply paid what they should be paid by their employer in the first place, and the terms of that were bound by labor laws.

I personally feel dirty every time I tip - it almost feels like being at a strip bar or something similar.

(To be clear, I always tip, because the people in those jobs rely on it. It's not their fault I don't like the system.)

Do you actually talk to service staff about this? Do they tell you they feel enslaved and demeaned by large tips? I have had this conversation repeatedly, and not one server has ever told me they felt bad about tips.

That's not fair. The service staff do not have an option to work in a place whether the salary is good enough that they don't have to rely on tips. Given the choice of working for 20 dollars per hour versus 10 per hour + average 15 per hour tip, I would go for the first option.

My experience is old, but I once spent five years working in restaurant kitchens. My friends included plenty of servers, bartenders and other tipped staff. A couple of the places were pretty popular, and the staff was happy to be raking in good tips on high-priced food. One of the places wasn't so popular or expensive, and people were pinching pennies to get by. Opinions about tipping varied by place.

I suspect, given your taste and profession, that you might be talking to more servers at the kinds of places where they'd be happy to collect tips that exceeded, say, minimum wage.

Where is this? Stockholm?

I don't think the parent poster mentioned anything about large tips. I myself read complaints about poor tips constantly in my Facebook feed, usually from the same disgruntled couple of service industry friends of mine. But then again, I don't think I have that many more friends in the service industry.

As far as I can see, tipping is not adds frustrating unpredictability to their income, but it also exposes them to discrimination.

As a customer, I find it annoying because it makes paying for my meal a math problem, particularly when dining in a group.

I see nothing wrong with a true gratuity for stellar service, but when it's just an unwritten (or written) extra cost, it's absurd. Just charge me what it costs to pay your service people.

Yes, dine in a group, split your bill, then work out how much tax needs to be split (since for some crazy reason it's not included in the price) then work out a tip.

If you left their income solely up to their employers, it would be more predictable. But it would also almost certainly be considerably lower.

You're suggesting that, in the status quo, some aspect of the tipping system is tilting the distribution of revenue toward servers instead of employers. Why do you think so?

Yep, that's what I'm saying.

If servers were paid entirely by the employers directly, they'd be paid the least amount that got an acceptable level of employee. Same as all other service industry jobs.

Since the payment was coming from the employer, it would be included in the meal price. Meal price is a competitive factor for restaurants, and all else being equal, those restaurants with lower meal prices will do better than equivalent restaurants with higher meal prices. The pressure to have lower meal prices would lead to lower pay for the employees. That would be one of the easiest places to cut costs, and thus prices.

Customers don't, as a rule, include tips in their evaluation of meal prices. So it removes the downward competitive pressure there.

What this really boils down to is that customers are more generous with direct payments to servers than their employers would be. Do you think this isn't true? Why?

But there's already a free market for labor, wage floor notwithstanding. Anybody who's paying above the minimum wage for servers already has to compete on wages. And they have to compete with other industries as well. Tipping simply allows the equilibrium base wage (and even the wage floor itself, by policy) to be lower than it would otherwise be.

Plenty of study shows that generosity or level of service have very little to do with tipping on the whole. People typically tip based on personal habit relative to their interpretation of local custom. (I can try to find sources if you doubt this.) I don't think there's any reason to believe that customers don't take gratuity, and tax for that matter, into account when deciding when and where to dine out.

I'm not suggesting that the situation would be the exact same for every server if tipping went away. Some would benefit, others would suffer. On the whole, it would be less discriminatory. But I don't see why we would expect to see a macro change in waitstaff income.

> But it would also almost certainly be considerably lower.

No, it wouldn't. It would be exactly the same. Because their employer knows exactly how much they will get in tips and subtracted that same amount from their salary. The cost of labor is constant, regardless of how you divide it.

Frankly, you're just flat out wrong on this. If the employer can capture this income, they will. You're welcome to present evidence otherwise.

If the employer captures too much income, the employee quits. That's what controls the amount the employer can capture and that's the labor wage for the work. This is econ 101.

Doesn't econ 101 have something to say about Pareto Efficiency, or is that a later course?

Oh, trust me, there's no shortage of retail jobs that don't do tips. You can work at a supermarket or a department store or any other store that employs cashiers. Even at a restaurant, you can always be a busboy or a dishwasher. If you're working a tipping job, it's because you specifically sought one out over other retail jobs.

People who work tipping jobs do so because they pay better on average, not because it's the only job available. Tips scale tremendously. If you work at a high-volume restaurant or, better, a restaurant with high prices, you'll be pulling in decent cash. And every once in a while, you'll get that mythican high-roller who decides to be charitable and drops a wad of cash on the table. Hell, a server at a fancy restaurant will be pulling in so much money that it would be absurd to categorize them them with other retail employees (once you get into super-fancy restaurants, serving is treated more like a concierge job than anything else).

Restaurant staff has a pecking order, much like high school. Of all the non-manager positions, servers are the most prestigious. Why? Because they make the most money.

> I personally feel dirty every time I tip

I understand what you mean. I used to find it odd. But in the US it's just part of the custom. My understanding is that tipping is expected and nobody really thinks about it. I consistently tip "tax times two" in New York, regardless of the service quality.

In Texas, that would be pretty skimpy. Perosnally, I tip 25-30%, but things are cheap out here.

BTW, I also don't tip based on service quality; I generally won't go back to a place if I don't like the service, but it's kind of expected that you're tipping... to the point where it's an ethical mandate.

It's a trade-off:

With tips you get some clear advantages over non tipping. The waiters have a huge incentive to give you a pleasant meal experience. This is very annoying to go to a restaurant and it appears to be more complicated for you to get water than it is when you're eating at home. This is what you often experience in no-tipping-countries restaurants. The tip is like an implicit contract with the waiter: Deliver me a good service, I will pay the price.

The cons: What about the kitchen staff, the host/hostess, do they get part of the tip? What happen when the food is terrible but the service awesome, or vice versa. But most important, as acjohnson55 mentions : but it also exposes them to discrimination. Sadly discrimination is real and tipping here doesn't help.

I think you're drawing a false correlation here between no-tip countries and poor service. There may be countries that don't have a custom of tipping and also have poor service, but there's very little reason to think that the two are actually related. For the same reason, there's very little to think that level of service in restaurants in the US is related to the expectation of the tip.

More generally, if a country seems to have poor restaurant service overall, that's a cultural thing. Introducing tipping would be unlikely to change it. To think otherwise is to think that waiters are only doing their job on the hope that they get a consideration, and that without that financial lure, they'd become lazy do-nothings. And that's both highly insulting and also illogical, because there's nothing unique about the job of being a waiter that would cause people to be lazy who would otherwise perform their job adequately in every other industry.

That might be a false correlation indeed, however I disagree when you say: "there's very little to think that level of service in restaurants in the US is related to the expectation of the tip"

waiters with good work ethics will offer a great service no matter if there is a tip involved in the end or not. Those with poor work ethics however would care less about providing a good service. I didn't mean to sound insulting to waiters, a lot of them do a great job, but I think that for some waiters the financial lure is important.

Except there's extremely little correlation between level of service provided and amount tipped.

"This is very annoying to go to a restaurant and it appears to be more complicated for you to get water than it is when you're eating at home. This is what you often experience in no-tipping-countries restaurants"

I think you are mistaken here.

In tipping countries waiters basically beg you to leave as soon as you've eaten. They are always around you to upsell something (bigger tip) or to passive aggressively bring you your check. Eating out for only an hour is common.

In non-tipping countries however, the waiter simply leaves you alone to eat in peace. They don't ask you "Do you need anything else" every 5 minutes. People on average stay out more because of this.

Which is why you feel ignored. Different cultures.

"In tipping countries waiters basically beg you to leave as soon as you've eaten." That is true, is it a perverse effect of the tip? (for an average meal on an average table, 1 tip of 30% in 2 hours is not as good as 2 tips at 20%) or is it just another culture: people in the USA eat faster than some south Europe countries for instance.

I grew up in a non-tipping country, this isn't a culture issue when some waiters are clearly hard to find in the restaurant, good waiters will leave you alone, but when you need them they will be here, or at least know when they need to take a look from far away and see if water/bread seems lacking.

This is annoying to just be frustrated when you planned to have a good night, and know that other people are going to be frustrated by that bad waiter too.

If I am unlucky and have to get a terrible waiter, I appreciate the fact that he/she is going to provide a minimum service because of the tip.

Fortunately, for non-tipping countries, reviews like Yelp/Foursquare/... kind of help the market I think, you can see what the reviews says about the service.

> The waiters have a huge incentive to give you a pleasant meal experience.

This is not true, in my experience. I have dined extensively in the USA and in many other countries and have not noticed any difference in the level of service provided.

This article from the chef at the Linkery (mentioned in TFA) is required reading on the subject.

I think the fact that there is good evidence that tipping is often racist and sexist is perhaps the strongest argument against it.

Part 1: http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...

Part 2: http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...

Part 3: http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...

Part 4: http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...

Part 5: http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...

Part 6: http://jayporter.com/dispatches/observations-from-a-tipless-...

This is a good article, and it goes into detail in the origins of tipping and why different countries tip differently that I hadn't seen before. But it only covers the restaurant industry. What about all the other jobs where tipping is expected? How about jobs where we're unsure whether to tip?

For example, since this is Hacker News, how about all the service industry startups, such as the transportation companies Uber and Lyft, or Postmates, or Instacart, or the many others that have sprung up? Of all of these, Uber is the only one I can think of that explicitly doesn't provide a means to tip. Most of these companies do offer a way to tip (although they generally leave the default at $0). When I use one of these companies, occasionally I ask the driver / delivery person / whoever what the expectation is, and usually the answer is something along the lines of the tip is completely optional and is provided because some people explicitly want to tip. But this answer is very unsatisfying, since I don't know if they're being truthful or if they've been instructed to tell people it's optional. Ultimately, I'm always left with a little bit of anxiety about whether I really should be tipping, and if so, how much is appropriate.

I ate at a restaurant in Berkeley a few weeks ago that doesn't accept tips, but instead automatically adds a 20% gratuity to your bill. This is a good first step, but I wish they would go one further and increase the price of menu items by 20%, rather than separating the prices.

Sous Beurre Kitchen in the Mission does just this:

http://sf.eater.com/2015/2/6/7974123/sous-beurre-kitchen-san...

I like seeing the service included in the bill, it makes it explicit that it's a separate thing from the dinner and something that I'm paying for.

So how about separate charges for cleaning and accounting?

The restaurant pays for a lot of other things too that are not directly part of the dinner. I don't understand why service should be considered special.

Because the service is a direct and prominent factor in your experience of the meal.

So are the ingredients, the recipe, and the individual elements of the cooking. I also personally rate restaurants on the comfort and style of the furnishing, the "ambience", the location, and events, if any (a Lebanese restaurant I like occasionally has a belly dancer).

None of these are separately itemized on my bill, nor would I expect them to be.

How is the server's wage different from the rest of the cost of the meal (profit, chef's wage, rent, electricity, carpet cleaning, etc.)?

From what I've seen, almost all restaurants where servers are tipped also pay those servers something low like $3/hr. I don't like tipping, but I don't like shorting them the money they're counting on to survive.

>From what I've seen, almost all restaurants where servers are tipped also pay those servers something low like $3/hr.

This isn't true for every state.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_State...

As someone who's both received and given tips, I love them. Why? Because they're a dead-simple way to convert money to happiness. When I received a big tip, it always brightened my shift a bit. And now, every time I go out to eat, I know that I can do the same for someone else.

Do you stand in the street and give people money? You can buy other's temporary happiness there too.

Haha not exactly, but I do frequently give to the homeless. The money goes even further there.

I like tipping high on servers and bartenders who have been exceptionally nice to me.

If someone is just friendly and helpful way beyond the call of duty, I'll probably drop a 25% tip in their lap just because if somebody makes my day, I want to make their day in return.

And then there was when my favorite bartender left his job at my favorite bar... I think I tipped almost 50% on his last night as a parting gift.

I typically tip quite generously (20-25%), but I hate the idea of tipping. I'd much prefer it was just included in the bill.

What bugs me the most is that it makes me stop and think about what to tip, which is why I always tip around the same amount.

I also don't always know when to tip. For example, I have a house cleaner coming this weekend. Is it customary to tip a house cleaner?

To tip!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQPIgm2FpU0

Reservoir Dogs was what popped into my head when I saw the title.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-qV9wVGb38

I have no problem with a society that tips regularly and normally. My problem is what happens when you don't tip.

Tipping should go away, since it is a classist holdover tradition, but not until wages in tipping countries increase significantly, and that depends on overall economic health and structures.

I think people consider not tipping mostly because of depressed economic conditions or situations and then they rationalize it.

I waited tables for a while at a range of restaurants from very nice steakhouses to exceptionally-high-profile clubs. I'm open to questions about my experiences with tipping, horror stories, weird guests, and my genuine thoughts on the matter.

If you have a repeat customer that is nice, but doesn't tip (or tips very poorly, like say 5%) does the staff treat him with less quality?

These do exist, and they always receive warm welcomes. They're considered like family.

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